some impressions from YAPC::Europe 2008

Day -1

My train journey from Vienna via Hamburg to Copenhagen was very comfortable, especially having a first class ICE ticket. The sunny crossing over some part of sea between Germany and Denmark was even more comfortable. I actually got a lot of work done on the train. After arriving in Copenhagen, I got some money and went to Jonas' place with a bus. Jonas was kindly hosting me for my first night. He has a nice apartment and a very friendly family. In the evening we cylced (because I prefer cycling to public transport) and met up with a few other people and went for some all-you-can eat pizza & salad and then to some Irish pub. Cider, yay! There even was free WLAN at the pub (courtesy of some neighbour).

Day 0

We got up quite early, and after some muesli and tea I worked a bit on talks and $work. At 11:00 I met up with Maroš at our "hotel", which is more of a hostel. But cheap. We met one more Perl hacker, and together went for a rather long walk through Copenhagen. We saw nice buildings, a very big russian sailboat, some funnily dressed soldiers staring at each other while being protected from nosy tourists by police, this mermaid (by accident...) and got quite wet. I've also realised how these very cool bicycle lights work and asked for them in several bike shops. They are more expensive than expected, and I later found the website of the company producing them.

Back at the hotel we rested a bit after meeting up with Elco, Daxim, Jozef, Emanuel and Jonathan. Then we headed for the Pre-Conf Meeting at the Globe, which was nice (more cider! and of course many more Perl people I haven't seen for some time). Way too late in the evening we headed back to the hotel.

Day 1

I had to be at the venue early to check whether the projector and the sound work with my laptop for the announcement of YAPC::Europe, which as you probably already know by now will happen in Lisbon.

Between talks I finished the slides for my talk on CPANTS. Speaking of CPANTS, it was even mentioned in the big room during Adam's talk. Yay! But of course it was all in a red font... Hmm. On the other hand, the metrics he dissed where implemented by Gabor, so I didn't feel too bad.

The evening was again spent at the Globe, and later in some other pub named 'The tatoverede enke' (or similar). Matt Trout told of us his crazy plans to get more Perl 6 features into Perl 5. Oh, and I actually had a beer! A cherry beer, but as the barkeeper informed me, "not the shitty stuff the belgians sell to tourists".

Day 2

This day I actually got breakfast and arrived at the venue in time to hear Damian's keynote. Which was great, as always. I then skipped most of the talks to finish my slides for die Perl, die!, which went quite well. For some strange reasons I can't remember at the moment, I ended up giving a lightning talk about Acme::ReturnValue.

In the evening the attendees dinner took place. There was good food, strange food (salmon made vegeterian-proof by wrapping it in bacon), and a very, very, very long queue to get the food. So instead of queueing, I went to the nearest supermarket and bought some Coke, which we later shared at our table. We had a few rounds of Bohnanza. On they way back I was seperated from Maroš (who had the key to the hotel room) by the very confusing subway system.

Day 3

More talks, more fun; a small IRC statemment started Juerd and me putting toghether a concept for a perl slide archive. The auction was a bit boring, so I wrote this entry during it. Now everybody is prepareing to leave for dinner and stuff..

More blog posts on YAPC will follow soonish

Thanks to hanekomu for proofreading whileI was typing (actually he is dictating this at the moment...)

Original: http://use.perl.org/~domm/journal/37195